The police have termed this an important step which will help them keep an eye on issues being discussed among youth on the Internet and to bridge the gap between the expectations of the public and delivery of police services.

Inaugurating the 24X7 lab, Commissioner of Police Satyapal Singh said its purpose was not to invoke censorship on discussions of various subjects, but only to analyse them.

“The youth protest at India Gate after the [December 2012] gang rape in Delhi was mainly fuelled by discussions on social networking sites. Taking a clue from that, we thought that the traditional sources of information do not sometimes give the correct picture of societal needs and misgivings and hence we decided to set up the country’s first social media lab.”

Dr. Singh said the lab’s primary work would be to understand the pulse of the citizenry and to prepare “ourselves for it.” “Till now, we haven’t ever tried to understand what is happening on the Internet, but now is the time to change that.” The lab would assimilate relevant information from all open sources in the public domain and 20 specially trained officers would work in shifts.

New Delhi: For nearly eight years, a woman from Kerala who was gang-raped by 42 men in 40 days has been waiting for the Supreme Court to take up her case.Today, the Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir said hearings will begin within three weeks.

The case is known as the Suryanelli rape case, after the village in Kerala where the woman lived with her parents. They have moved houses twice since then, driven out they say by jeering neighbours.

“Nobody accepts us; when they see us, they try to avoid us. We don’t go out,” said her father.

The Supreme Court’s decision today to begin hearing her case comes after the Chief Justice said yesterday that fast-track trials are essential for rape cases. His comments were made as he inaugurated a special court which will hold daily hearings in the case of a 23-year-old medical student who died after being raped by six men on a moving bus on December 16. The attack and her death have pushed India into demanding improved safety for women and tougher and more effective laws for sexual crimes.

In the Suryanelli case, a 16-year-old was abducted by a bus conductor who raped her, then passed her onto others, some of who were powerful and well-connected in Kerala at the time.

She was then discarded with no money and in no condition to return home – she couldn’t sit or stand because of her injuries.

It was her case that led in 1999 to the commissioning of Kerala’s first special court dedicated to handling cases of sexual assault.

35 people accused of raping her were convicted. But the Kerala High Court, three years later, reversed that decision, holding only one person guilty. The grounds for this verdict were criticised by many people.

Her family and the state prosecutor both appealed to the Supreme Court in 2005 against the High Court’s verdict. Nothing happened after that.

The family survives on her parents’ pensions. The victim was given a job as a peon in a government department but in February, she was arrested and suspended for financial misappropriation.